How we verify Ohio data
Every number on our Ohio pages comes from Ohio Checkbook (checkbook.ohio.gov), the state's own transparency portal. This page is the standing verification report: what we hold, the quality gates every load must pass, and the reconciliation math against the state's own published totals, including the part that doesn't match.
The chain of custody
Each record travels the same six steps, and every step leaves evidence:
- The state records a payment in its accounting system.
- The state publishes it in bulk on Ohio Checkbook (checkbook.ohio.gov).
- We fetch the official bulk file; every fetch is logged with a timestamp, and failures are recorded too.
- The state's row is archived exactly as received and fingerprinted. The archive is append-only: records are never edited or deleted, even when the state overwrites its own history.
- Names are normalized with deterministic rules (see methodology); the original name is kept alongside, and quality gates run on every load.
- Pages are published from a versioned release; the version appears at the foot of every page.
Quality gates
A Ohio release does not go live unless all four gates pass. Current status:
| Gate | Result |
|---|---|
| Extraction integrity | Published payment facts re-derived from the raw archive match to the penny: identical row counts and dollar sums. |
| No orphan payments | Every payment resolves to a vendor and an agency record. Zero orphans. |
| Duplicate rate | 0.0000% duplicates on the natural-key fingerprint across 24.8 million payments. |
| Portal reconciliation | Fiscal-year dollar totals reconcile against Ohio's own published figures within a documented tolerance (details below). |
The reconciliation math, FY 2025
Ohio's fiscal year 2025 ran July 1, 2024 through June 30, 2025. It is the most recent closed fiscal year we publish.
Ohio publishes its own total spending figures. Those totals include categories the vendor-payment checkbook feed does not carry, so a fair comparison removes them. Here is the whole calculation, to the cent:
| Ohio Checkbook, total FY 2025 spending (all agencies) (captured Jul 8, 2026) | $104,700,247,497.31 |
| minus Personal Services (State payroll. The checkbook transaction feed we ingest covers vendor payments, not employee pay, which Ohio publishes separately.) | −$6,223,189,059.80 |
| minus Transfers and Non-Expense (Internal fund movements, not payments to outside vendors.) | −$13,780,577,728.83 |
| Comparable portal figure | $84,696,480,708.68 |
| SpendLedger FY 2025 payment sum | $83,991,873,862.58 |
| Difference: 0.832%, within the documented 1% tolerance | PASS |
The remaining 0.832% is unattributed. Likely contributors are partial debt-service inclusion, expense-category edge cases, and timing differences. We publish the gap rather than hide it, and we investigate rather than adjust our numbers to match.
Known limitations
- Coverage begins January 3, 2022, when Ohio's usable bulk data begins. Fiscal year 2022 is therefore partial (Ohio's FY 2022 started July 1, 2021).
- Fiscal year 2026 records are loaded in our archive but not yet published on this site while a data-quality issue in the state's file is resolved.
- Payments to individuals that Ohio's own search tool masks are withheld by name here as well; their dollars remain in agency totals.
Check us yourself
Beyond the automated gates, we hand-verify random samples of individual payments against the portal's own search (vendor name plus date plus amount). A single mismatch is treated as a stop-the-line event for the source. You can do the same: pick any payment on this site and look it up on the state's own portal by vendor name and date. If the portal disagrees with us, we want to know.
Machine-readable version of this report: /trust/oh/provenance.json. Report content last reviewed Jul 9, 2026.